All Time Low-Dirty Work
Pop-punk youngsters All Time Low have become a massive prospect over the past year, swiftly rising up festival bills and gracing magazine covers the world over. Their bubblegum sound having appealed to many across the globe, all eyes are on them now to see if they can justify all this success with fourth album "Dirty Work". The results sadly are not overly optimistic.
Opener 'Do You Want Me (Dead?)' is very promising, shamelessly pop while still possessing a real kick and retaining the same infectious spirit of popular single 'Weightless'. The song brings in elements of Fall Out Boy's heyday with its piercing guitar lines and great vocal hooks and opens the album brilliantly. Unfortunately the album already begins to waver on lead single and second track 'I Feel Like Dancin'. The track is musically decent with its latter day Weezer-esque stomp (not surprising considering the song was co-written with Rivers Cuomo) and has a dance-along vibe throughout, but the lyrics feel uninspired, striving too much to be tongue-in-cheek and instead coming off as more obvious than clever. The same can be said for 'Forget About It', a good tune with a brilliant use of studio electronics but marred by frontman Alex Gaskarth's, at times, cringe-worthy lyrics and vocal delivery.
From here the album hits somewhat of a downward spiral as these highlighted bad points grow to overshadow the good. Arena-rocker 'Time Bomb' is unengaging and flat with a wishy-washy chorus, 'Under A Paper Moon' squanders a promising melody for FM tedium and 'That Girl' highlights once again Gaskarth's lyrical inadequacies.
Luckily the album does have moments where it threatens to bring it back. 'Just The Way I'm Not' has an undeniably huge sound and a fun feel while closing track 'No Heroes', although sounding exactly like Fall Out Boy circa 2003, has a nice punch to it that the majority of the album does not. These moments are more frustrating than anything though because they serve as evidence that the band, as on 'Weightless', can knock out a great pop-punk tune if they want to.
This is a fairly decent album but with pop-punk brilliance coming from contemporary and much smaller bands like The Wonder Years and The Swellers, one can't help but feel that this isn't really good enough.